København

Wow.

I went to Copenhagen this weekend with a few other American friends that I study with in Lund. It was absolutely astonishing. It is such a vibrant and colorful city, so very different from the quiet summertime daze of Lund. We left Friday afternoon after our first Swedish final -- I am now in Swedish 2! The trip to CPH is less than an hour.

We spent most of Friday and Saturday wandering around the city, taking in the sites and the smells (the canal is pretty rank, actually) and the people. I think we lived the Danish life for a few days. Every now and then we would spot at a particularly scenic spot and have a fika (a Swedish word, sort of like a coffee-break but more drawn-out and social) or a glass of good Danish beer, or a small snack. On Friday we went to the main square, the City Hall, the Danish Opera, and the Stadparken (city park). We watched the sunset over the canal.

Saturday we saw the Little Mermaid. She looks just like she does in all the pictures. Apparently, she's lost her head a few times. Lastly and most famously, a feminist group cut off her head with a chainsaw because they were upset that she was bare-breasted. Then they left the head in a 7-11 for authorities to find and reattach. Weird. We also went to Hans Christian Andersen's grave, the man who made the Mermaid famous in his fairy-tales. He is buried in the same cemetery as Søren Kirkegård, the philosopher who I have come to love as Johann Di'Silencio. It was actually sort of sad to walk around the Copenhagen cemetery, because a lot of the graves had been tagged. I heard that a group of hippy-artists had taken over a house near the cemetery as squatters and had used it as their artistic/hippy base for many years. The government finally kicked them out of the house, though, because it as actually government-owned. The hippies rioted, however, and went into the cemetery and tagged a bunch of the gravestones, including Hans Christian Andersen's.

Most graves had 666 scrawled across them, along with an upside-down cross. Others were even less inventive -- poor Carl Poller's grave was tagged with "er død" (is dead). They scrawled "Dansk Kultur" across HC Andersen's. It is a reminder of the audacity of the present generation -- that our problems are more important than protecting the remnants of history. I was shocked walking around Copenhagen to see that so many monuments had graffiti on them. I mean, I understand that Denmark, like Sweden, had a large graffiti culture right now and it's an artistic mark on the world (Swedish graffiti I mean, much unlike the tagging in America). But so many monuments are just destroyed by someone who wrote "It's graffiti!" in spray-paint. That can't be removed. They've ruined a piece of history that we'll never get back. Just for a laugh. It's just very sad.

We also saw the palace of the Danish royal family (no luck on meeting cute princes!) and wandered along the canal for a bit. It seems that Danes, Swedes, and Germans are pretty serious about their sailboats!

We were going to go op to Helsingør/Helsingborg (the site of the castle where Shakespeare placed Hamlet) this weekend also, but we realized that our class is going there in two weeks, so we will wait and go with the rest of the class later.

As always, check out my flickr page to see some of my photos! And if you ever get the chance, go to Copenhagen! There is a large purple tree in the Stadparken which is great for shade on warm sunny summer days!

Hejdå! (good-bye)

Some Swedish for your to learn
Kopenhamn -- Copenhagen
Öresundtåg -- "Ear-sound" Train (it connects Copenhagen to Malmö across the Öresund)
Slott -- castle
fika -- to have coffee and a snack with friends, a social gathering